Martin Scorsese paid tribute to the late Reiners in essay published in The New York Timesletter, “Rob Reiner was my friend, and so was Michelle. From now on I will have to use the past tense and it fills me with such deep sadness. But there is no other choice.”
The Rainers, 78 and 70, were found dead at their Brentwood home on Dec. 14 with stab wounds. Their 32-year-old son, Nick Rayner, was arrested and charged with two counts of murder.
Scorsese first became acquainted with Rob Reiner shortly after moving to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, when he began going to parties hosted by George Memmoli and filled with comedians and actors.
“Rob and I were, in a sense, transplants from the East,” Scorsese wrote. Rainer came from show business royalty, with his parents being entertainers Carl and Estelle Rainer. “It was 100 percent New York humor, and it hung in the air that I breathed.”
“I immediately liked hanging out with Rob. We had a natural affinity for each other. He was funny and sometimes mordantly funny, but he was never the kind of guy who would take over a room,” Scorsese wrote. “He had a wonderful sense of unlimited freedom, he thoroughly enjoyed life in the moment, and he laughed great. When he was honored at Lincoln Center, Michael McKean gave a little speech that was a brilliant parody of solemn official speeches. Before he got to the punch line, Rob was laughing so hard that it could be heard throughout the room.”
Reiner's favorite Scorsese film is Misery, which he called “a very special film with wonderful performances from Kathy Bates and James Caan.” And he wrote that “This Is Spinal Tap” is “top class…a flawless creation.” When Scorsese was casting for his 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street, he “immediately thought of Rob” to play Leonardo DiCaprio's Jordan Belfort's father.
“He could improvise with the best, he was a master of comedy, he worked wonderfully with Leo and the rest of the guys, and he understood the human predicament of his character: this man loved his son, he was glad for his success, but he knew that he was destined for downfall,” Scorsese wrote of Reiner. “There's that wonderful moment when Rob watches Jon Favreau explain to Leo that he can walk away relatively unscathed if he just leaves his company before the SEC has a chance to charge him with wrongdoing. The look on Rob's face when he realizes that Leo is wavering and won't stop eventually is so telling. “You have all the money in the world,” he says. “Do you want everyone else’s money?” A loving father, puzzled by his son.”
Scorsese added: “I was moved by the delicacy and openness of his performance as we shot it, moved again as we put the scene together in the edit, and moved by the finished film. Now I'm torn by the tenderness of Rob's performance in this and other scenes.”
The director concluded his essay this way: “What happened to Rob and Michelle is an obscenity, an abyss in living reality. The only thing that will help me accept it is the passage of time. So, like all their loved ones and their friends – and these were people with many, many friends – I need to be allowed to imagine them alive and well… and that one day I will be at a dinner or a party and find myself sitting next to Rob, and I will hear his laugh and see him blissfully look into his eyes and laugh at his stories, enjoy his natural humor and feel happy again to have him as a friend.”
